[Video shown: Kimyal Bible 10 minute version – this video shows the great joy the Kimyal Tribe of Papua, Indonesia have as they receive the first copies of the New Testament in their own language.]
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made. In Him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. – John 1:1-5
This is our main text today – these 5 verses, the opening of the Gospel of John. In the video, did you notice how some of the themes of these verses were shared by these Kimyal people? They talked about the Word, and they talked about Light. This day they received the Bible in their own language was a glorious beginning for them, as they were receiving the Word.
All of us had some point in our lives where we read the gospel of John for the first time. What a powerful opening! John uses relatively simple words, but there is a sense of the deeply profound in this passage. Today I want to dig deeply into these five verses, exploring word meanings, the historical context, and how it responded to the prevailing philosophical and religious thinking of the day.
Now at the outset let me give two “disclaimers.” First, if you are new here, let me say that we don’t normally do this – our messages are meaty, but some aspects of what I am doing today go much deeper than we normally go; we also don’t normally focus on just 5 verses in a message, but go for more breadth. But we are doing this today because I think there is value in approaching Scripture lots of different ways; sometimes we do it topically, as we did in our series taken from Proverbs last year; sometimes we do surveys moving quickly over vast areas of Scripture, as we did in our series called Broken Vessels, about the various people of the Old Testament. And sometimes we go a single book of the Bible, about a chapter or half a longer chapter at a time. Later on this year, as we return to the book of John, this will be more our pace. But today, and for the next two weeks, we are slowing way down to plumb the depths of the first 34 verses of the first chapter of the book of John.
Second, it is not necessary to plumb the depths like this to understand the message of John. I am certainly not implying that I think your daily quiet times should be like this. But I do think it adds to our understanding and appreciation of the text, and can even help clarify our understanding so that our understanding of the person of God is not corrupted by faulty thinking or wrong messages from our culture. And for me personally, going deep like this helps me grow in my appreciation and love of the Scriptures themselves. I want to be more like the Kimval people, appreciating the miracle of the Bible so that I am more motivated to spend time in it every day and so that I am more thankful to God, more eager to worship Him, for the gift of His Word.
Let me also, before I go any further, explain the title, Logos.God. This doesn’t refer to a website; instead it borrows on a type of notation found in a variety of computer programming languages. When one writes firstthing.secondthing, it means that the secondthing is an attribute, or property, of the firstthing. And so when I write Logos.God, what I mean is that “God” is an attribute or property of Logos. We will explore what this means in depth today. So back to our passage:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made. In Him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. – John 1:1-5
A. The meaning of “Word”
I find it profound that John, inspired by the Holy Spirit, uses the term Word to begin his gospel. In Greek the word is logos, and this is a word filled with overtones and resonances and implied meanings. Logos triggered a whole set of emotions and thoughts for the religious Jews who heard it, and it also triggered a whole different set of emotions and thoughts for those who thought more like the Greeks. I want to dig deep into this word.
Some commentators have stated that logos is the overarching theme of John’s gospel, and I tend to agree. Logos comes from the Greek root word leg, appearing in lego which means to lay, then pick out, gather, and pick up, and then to put words thus selected together, and so, to speak. The ever-popular children’s toys with the name Legos are appropriately named, as they are all about assembling those plastic bricks to make creations only limited by your creativity. In the same way, the logos is a collecting of things in the mind and the creations made are the words that are expressed. It refers both to the inward thoughts and to the outward speech that expresses these thoughts.
B. The Logos in Hebrews
As John often does in his writings, he uses relatively common words and uses them in a way that makes them heavily symbolic, even mystical. It does not appear that John invented these meanings but that people had already associated such meanings with the words, and so John was able to write in this way knowing that people would immediately pick up on the associations. We have such words like this in our culture. An example is the word “heart;” when we say, “he put his whole heart into it,” we immediately know that we are not saying that the poor guy opened up his chest, cut out his cardiac muscle and put the entire muscle into whatever the “it” is; we know that it means he gave it his all. In the same way, logos was filled with meaning that John’s contemporary readers, both Jew and Greek, would pick up on.
We can get an idea of some of this imbued meaning by simply looking at other uses of the word in Scripture. Now many of these uses are the “plain” use, just as when we say “heart,” sometimes we really mean that muscle in our chests that pumps our blood. But consider the opening of the book of Hebrews:
In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. – Hebrews 1:1-3
The Logos is God’s speaking, and God’s speaking in these last days is through His Son. Jesus is God’s ultimate revelation about Himself to us, God’s Logos, God’s Word.
C. The Logos in Genesis
Now when Jews heard (or read) about the logos in John, especially when coupled with the phrase “in the beginning,” they would naturally think about the other book of “beginnings,” Genesis. In Genesis chapter 1, verses 3, 6, 9, 11, 14, 20, 24, and 26 all begin with basically the same phrase. Do you know what it is? It is “And God said…” This sounds exactly like logos! God formed the ideas in His infinite mind, and then He said let it be thus, and then it was thus. Now why did it happen like this? Did God have to say it? Genesis 1 could have been written by simply saying that first God made this and then He made that and so on. But that’s not what is written. Again and again it emphasizes that God spoke, “Let it be thus and thus,” and then that is exactly what happened. It is a mystery to me why it is so, but there is no question that it is so. In the beginning was the logos.
D. The Logos elsewhere in the Old Testament
There are countless passages that speak of the Word of God in one form or another in the Old Testament. Sometimes they referred to simply the Law, but sometimes they implied more, something deeper. Here are a few examples. I have capitalized Word in these translations, because we know from ancient commentaries that they viewed the uses of Word in these passages as heavily laden with veiled meaning.
A voice says, “Cry out.” And I said, “What shall I cry?” “All men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall, because the breath of the Lord blows on them. Surely the people are grass. The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the Word of our God stands forever.” – Isaiah 40:6-8
Here the Word is personified. It stands. And it is eternal, everlasting.
Some became fools through their rebellious ways and suffered affliction because of their iniquities. They loathed all food and drew near the gates of death. Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and He saved them from their distress. He sent forth His Word and healed them; He rescued them from the grave. – Psalm 107:17-20
Here the Word is sent. Here the Word is a healer. Here the Word is a rescuer, rescuing even from death.
He sends His command to the earth; His Word runs swiftly. He spreads the snow like wool and scatters the frost like ashes. He hurls down His hail like pebbles. Who can withstand His icy blast? He sends His Word and melts them; He stirs up His breezes, and the waters flow. – Psalm 147:15-18
Here again the Word is personified. It runs. Again the Word is sent. It is a messenger and a “melter,” perhaps symbolizing an agent of repentance, perhaps symbolizing a bringer of new life, of spring, of melting, much like the symbolism in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in Narnia.
As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is My Word that goes out from My mouth: It will not return to Me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it. – Isaiah 55:10-11
Here the Word is sent. Here the Word will return to God, and it will not return empty, but will achieve the purpose of God. It is called, in effect, a source of living water, water for life, and it is called, in effect, a sower of seed, and it is called, in effect, a provider of bread.
The rabbis discussed these and other passages. They sensed mystery here; they knew they could not refer just to the Law of Moses, but what? That was the mystery.
John opens his gospel by proclaiming that this mysterious Word that is eternal, that is a healer, a rescuer even from death, a messenger sent by the Father, a bringer of “spring,” of new life, one that will return to God and achieve God’s purpose, a source of living water, a sower of seed, and a provider of bread – John proclaims who this mysterious Word is: It was there in the beginning, before creation! It was with God! And it was God! Everything was made through Him. God spoke, Logos, and He created. And in Him is light. And in Him is life, real life. And yes it is mystery – the darkness does not understand, or an equally valid translation from the Greek, the darkness cannot do anything about it – it cannot overcome it.
Do you realize how much of the gospel is found just by looking at a few verses in the Old Testament that speak of the Word? To the Jews who studied and pondered over these passages, John was shouting from the rooftops – this is Jesus! This is God!
E. The Logos in Translation
According to several specialists on these things, including Marvin R. Vincent, who wrote a wonderful book called Word Studies in the New Testament in 1887, after the time of the Jews’ captivity in Babylon, in the Targums, or Aramaic paraphrases of the Old Testament, which were regularly read in the synagogues, they substituted God’s name with the word Memra. There is a tradition in Judaism, even today, of not writing God’s name on paper because it might be destroyed, and it is seen as disrespectful to God to do such a thing. So imagine reading passage after passage of the Old Testament and substituting the word Memra wherever God’s name should be. What does Memra mean? You guessed it – Word! This tradition continued in some translations into Greek at the time of Jesus, except here they would use the Greek word – logos.
So here is an example:
But while Joseph was there in the prison, the Lord was with him; He showed him kindness and granted him favor in the eyes of the prison warden. – Gen. 39:20b-21
In their translation they would have:
But while Joseph was there in the prison, the Word was with him; He showed him kindness and granted him favor in the eyes of the prison warden. – Gen. 39:20b-21
Isn’t that incredible? And so John is saying, “Hey, that’s no accident. The Word really is God! That’s right!”
It really is amazing to think how God has orchestrated things for this to happen. He made them choose Memra and later translate it into Logos, and then He gave the word Logos to John to use at the beginning of his gospel. It reminds me of other ways I have seen how God has orchestrated events to make them symbolic and point people to the gospel. For example, I think about how in the Jewish Passover ceremony they use three Matzas, three pieces of the unleavened bread, and how, after the meal, the middle matza is broken and taken and eaten. How symbolic of the second person in the trinity, broken for us, even “striped” like Jesus received stripes, and how amazing that Jesus even partook of such a matza on the night before He was crucified and said, this is My body, take and eat. Do this in remembrance of Me. How incredible is the orchestration of events! And to me, equally incredible, that the ancient translators replaced God with Logos. When children would ask their parents what that means, they would say, oh, the Logos is God. Think about that!
F. Correcting the Greek ideas of Logos
What about the Greeks? And by the Greeks, I mostly mean the Hellenized Jews, Jews that, to one degree or another, had bought into various aspects of Greek philosophy and tried to reconcile them with their Jewish beliefs.
Now, a lot of the Greek philosophers believed that there was some higher power that existed, somewhere, and they believed this because man had a mind, and could think and reason, so it had to come from somewhere. And so they thought that this higher power somehow gave man the ability to reason and think as well. The Stoics, for example, would say that there was a “divine animating principle” pervading the universe. It was reason, but it wasn’t a person at all. It was a substance, a material, that made things think and animated. It was divine, but again, not a personal god. Things like rocks didn’t have any divine animating principle in them, since they were inanimate. But humans did have some divine animating principle in them. What did they call this stuff? The Force? No, they called it Logos.
Now in contrast to the beliefs of the Stoics were the beliefs of Plato and his followers. As one of C.S. Lewis’ characters would say, “It’s all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?” Now I realize most of us went to “these schools” that didn’t teach Plato. I don’t want to get overly bogged down here, but I do want to tell you a little about what Plato taught.
In particular, Plato taught that non-material abstract “forms” (or ideas) were the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. According to Plato, the material world, things we discern with our senses, were a lower form of reality. As a rough idea of what Plato was getting at, consider drawing a triangle on a piece of paper. Plato would point out that what you drew is far from perfect; the lines aren’t straight, the lines don’t meet up exactly into corners, the line thickness is not uniform, and so on. But we can think about a perfect triangle, one in which the lines are perfectly uniform and straight and meet up perfectly. Plato would say that the perfect triangle we are thinking of is more “real” than the one we drew. The form of the triangle is perfect, it is atemporal (beyond time) and aspatial (beyond space).
What various followers of Plato extrapolated was that the best stuff is never physical. The heresy of Gnosticism was based on some of these extrapolations. In particular, Gnostics believed that some people were somatics and others were pneumatics. Soma is Greek for body, and Pneuma is Greek for breath, or spirit. The somatics were people who just believed in and paid attention to the physical world. They were doomed because of this. The pneumatics, however, had secret knowledge (gnosis) and thus had access to the “form” of the ideal person. Through proper understanding and application of this secret knowledge, the pneumatic, they taught, could eventually escape this physical world and move on to the perfect world of ideals, of forms.
At the time of Jesus, one person who tried to merge some of the ideas of Plato with those of Stoics and those of Judaism was a man known as Philo of Alexandria. Philo, like Plato, believed in the idea of forms, and so he took the Old Testament only semi-literally. What he thought was more important was the forms indicated by the various things described in the Old Testament. In some ways you might be tempted to think this sounds like what we might say about how Christ “fulfilled” much of the Old Testament, that much of the Old Testament was “shadows” of the greater reality to be found in Christ. But, in contrast to Philo, we would also say that the Old Testament is quite literally true as well; we would say that God, as the author of history, used foreshadowing in historical events to hint of the greatest events of history, those involving Christ. Philo had no Christ figure and he downplayed or ignored or even refuted the idea that the Old Testament was historically true, so these two views are really completely different.
Now, Philo, and those who followed him, also believed, like the Stoics, in the Logos, the divine animating principle. But his beliefs based on Plato made him see the physical world as imperfect, so there were needed intermediary beings to bridge the gap between imperfect matter and perfect ideas, He viewed the Logos as the highest of these beings. Philo would call this Logos a being, but in some ways it was more like a “thinking machine” than what we would call a soul. It was seen as the thing that brought forth the physical world from the ideals. Later on, the Gnostics continued to hold to a similar sort of view.
OK – back to the Bible! John, inspired by the Holy Spirit, uses the word logos to powerfully speak to the Jews about the answer to the mysterious unknown something in the Old Testament, but at the same time he also very soundly refutes and corrects the various erroneous beliefs of the Greek philosophers. Look again at John 1:1-5.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made. In Him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. – John 1:1-5
The Logos was there at the beginning, yes, but it was God Himself! Not an intermediate being, but God Himself. And the Logos, being God, was willing to “get His hands dirty.” He didn’t have the view of the world as a lesser thing only hinting at the true forms like the Plato-followers did. All things were made directly by God, just as it says in Genesis.
G. The Logos and God are one.
The Logos was with God. The Greek is proscontheon, which means, literally, face to face with God. From what I have read, in the Greek there is no way to describe a relationship with more intimacy than using this phrase. The Logos was with God, and yet the Logos was God. That certainly threw the Greeks (and the Jews) for a loop! And the Greek is unambiguous in that God really means God. It doesn’t mean divine, or having a divine nature, or being godly, or godlike, but it means God. The Logos was with God and yet the Logos was God. How could that be?
We know this is part of the mystery of the trinity – God in three Persons, distinct, yet coexisting in unity, co-equal, co-eternal. Three persons, yet of one being. Yes, this is mystery, but it is not surprising to me that as we talk about the very nature of God we find things hard to comprehend. In fact, I would be surprised if there was no mystery. Who are we to fully comprehend the mind and nature of God?
But in God in the trinity we find things we would expect to find, since we find them outside of God – we find love, we find relationship, we find submission, all of these things are found in God. And the amazing thing is that He has created us in His image, to share in these things in Him. It is a good question, I think, why God made anything. He did not do it out of any incompleteness in Him.
H. In the Logos is life.
Interestingly, the word in Greek is zoe, which is the word for spiritual life, for eternal life. He doesn’t use the word bios, from which we get biology, which refers to physical life. John talks about this life 54 times in his gospel. Again, John refutes the Greek thinking. Life isn’t found in secret knowledge, gnosis, life is found in the Logos. And how gets in to the Logos is the heart of the gospel. It’s not by secret knowledge, or by good works. It is by faith in Christ.
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. – John 3:16
That word for life is zoe.
I. The life in the Logos is light for men.
This is my final point today. Light is also a major theme in the writings of John. Did you notice in our video this morning that several times they talked about light? To enlighten is to make it so you can see. And light fills a room – God’s light fills our hearts. And just as darkness is powerless to beat back the light from a flashlight, so is Satan powerless to overcome the light that comes from life in the Logos. In the Greek the word is katalamabano– it even sounds like the language in that video! The darkness literally couldn’t extinguish the light. May you allow your hearts to be filled with His light.
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